Functions Menu

This function prints out this particular Diary Item with basic Company details. It will most often be used by Sales Administrators for giving to their Sales personnel for the recording of Results once the Action has been completed.

This is a repeat of the function on the Companies screen, Print Company with Diary Items. It prints basic details of the Company together with any related Diary Items.

If the communication with the Company specified after the Result has been entered is in any way incomplete (for example you need to follow up an appointment with a quotation), enter a Next Action to remind you to do it. This creates a new Diary Item which is a duplicate of the current Done Diary Item, except that it is To Do. What was the Result is now the Action Description of the new item so that you don’t lose track of the sequence of events. Specify the Date Do and the Action then accept the record by clicking [√].

The Message button allows you to enter a message (or any other kind of Diary item) to more than one person’s Diary at a stroke.

Before selecting the function, complete the Diary item with your message (ie Action Code), which should be addressed to one of the people it is to go to. When you select the menu item, you will be asked to select the people it is to go to: highlight the relevant Personnel listed, and use the [Select] button to reduce the list to just those required. Click [√] to accept the list. You will then be asked ‘Are you sure?’, and duplicates will be made of the current Diary Item to each of the people specified (ie their initials will appear in the Person field). Your initials will appear in the Originator field of the Diary Items created.

On the Access Rights screen of Personnel setup, there is a check box ‘Check Diary Macros and Messages’. If the recipient of your Message has this switched on, this user will always have an extra process (launched on startup) that periodically checks whether any messages have come in that need responding to.

There is a setting in the Core Functions Section of Preferences to define the ‘Message Action’. This Action is searched for in the Diary once every minute, and a message will appear if any are found. If just one is found, it says who the message is from and gives a brief version of the Description text. If more than one is found, the recipient will be told how many items there are, and asked ‘Do you wish to see them?’. If you wish to send an urgent message, therefore, ensure that your recipient has this check box switched on, and that the Action Code you use is that of the Message Action.

The Allocate function works exactly as the Message to Personnel function described above, but creates duplicates of the current Diary item to each selected Company rather than person. You might, for example, have typed in 100 new addresses and want to remind yourself to call them all. Create a Diary Item for one of the Companies, then select the function. Use the normal View Companies selection process to choose the relevant list. Click [√] to accept the list and a duplicate of the Diary Item will be created for each of the Companies selected.

This function is used to check that the Person for whom a Diary Item is currently being entered will not be double-booked by that Diary Item.

If Time Conflict checking is switched on, this check will automatically be made when you accept the Diary Item by clicking [√]. However, you can manually carry out a check by using this menu item if, for example, you want to test a few time slots to see if the Person is free.

Note that this feature can be used for resource management if you have resources (such as Training Room, Conference Room or Boardroom) entered in Personnel and Resources and you book them by creating Diary Items in their name. The routine uses the Time Do From and Time Do To fields. It only considers Diary Items that have one of the Time Do fields completed.

Note that if you allocate Time Dos to a Diary Item that spans multiple Date Dos, you are effectively saying that the Person is booked From x Time on Day 1 To y Time on Day z - which means that it is very likely to cause Time Conflicts. If you then chose, for example, to allocate a Time for an Appointment on a Day that fell in between the first Item’s Date range, an alert of ‘Conflict: Time: All Day’ would result.

Each Diary Item is flagged when it is checked for Time Conflicts. A Diary Item is not flagged if it is new, and if the Dates and Times have been modified, the flagging is reversed. If the check has been done prior to accepting the record using this menu item, Enterprise 6, if appropriate, will inform you that ‘That Time is not booked’ or ‘Time checking is only valid for To Do Diary Items with a Date and Time specified’, whereas the automatic checking done on saving is silent unless there is a conflict. If either method finds a conflict, you will be advised that the Person ‘is already booked as follows:’, and then told the Company Code, Company Name, Action Code, Action Name, Do From Time and Do To Time of the first conflicting Diary Item. The assumed button is [Try again], but you can also [Allow] it.

Note that since the message only mentions the first item, it would be possible to get a message telling you to avoid, for example, 10 to 11am, then when you’ve changed to 12pm to get another message telling you to avoid that time as well. If you get a conflict message by using the menu item, note that [Try again] does not, as it often does, clear the last input field. Trying again simply means that the Diary Item is left in the unflagged state - so that if you did make no more changes the message would appear again when you accept the record. Note also that if the Time Checking is done manually from the menu, the Diary record is saved during the process - which means that changes prior to using the function cannot be cancelled.

There is an option in the Core Section of the Preferences called ‘Diary Time Check’ which needs to be set up for Time Conflict checking to work. This is a Time field which should either be left blank, which means ‘perform no Diary Time Conflict Checking’, or should filled in with, for example 01:00 or 02:00. This represents the precision with which you want the conflict checking to work: a time of one hour means ‘give a warning of conflicts when the times clash within the hour’. In other words, if one appointment is set for 11am, another at 11:59 would conflict, while one at 12pm would not.

If this feature is enabled, the time taken to save a Diary Item will be a little longer.

Use this function to switch between the fast QuickAccess version of the Diary entry screen and the slower, more detailed version. The more detailed screen can be contrasted with the QuickAccess version:

The main differences between the two versions of the screen are: the QuickAccess screen does not show related data apart from the necessary Company & Contact - ie Personnel, Action, Result, Job and Product; the Macro Code and all the related file fields at the base of the full version’s screen do not appear (these cause the full Diary screen to be slow to appear because Enterprise 6 has to check whether the user has the correct privileges to use these fields and make them non-enterable if not); the text fields have lost their scroll bars, but are slightly larger; and the Title area is non-enterable. In addition, the QuickAccess Diary screen does not feature the Date Do To, Date Done To, Time Do and Time Done To fields. Therefore on this screen, when you modify any Time or Date fields, you are modifying the From versions, and the To versions will always automatically be made the same. This may cause you to modify something in QuickAccess that had already been defined with a range in Full Access.

This function is used to increase a selected text field to full screen size for ease of typing. The cursor must be in a text field for the function to operate. The two text fields on the Diary screen are the Action Description and the Result Description. This window has a Functions menu with ‘Find’ and ‘Replace’ facilities.

‘Find…’ (<Command-F>/) allows you to specify what to Find. It will remember what was last searched for, or will pick up any word or phrase currently highlighted in the text. The searching is done from the current cursor position onwards. The first found example is highlighted for manual editing.

‘Find Next’ (<Command-G>/) finds the next occurrence of the text string last specified in the ‘Find…’ or ‘Replace…’ dialogue box.

‘Replace…’ (<Command-R>/) shows a window with a field for the text string to be found and another for its replacement. The [Replace] button replaces the first instance found after the current cursor position (including the current highlight if that represents the text to be found), and places the cursor after the last character of the replacement made.

The window features a [Replace All] (<Command-A>/<Control-A>) button, which changes all instances from the current cursor position onwards.

'Replace Next' (<Command-T>/<Control-T>) replaces the next occurrence of the text string to be found.

To revert to the normal screen, click [√] if you wish to save the changes you have made to the text, or [X] if you do not.

You can use the Diary to pass messages to other people in your company, perhaps by using the ‘Message to Personnel’ function, or by entering the initials of the person to receive the message in the Person field. In such a situation, you can also attach a sound to the message. To do so, use this function to record the sound. The receiver of the message will use the same function to play the sound back.